Giacomo Puccini could judge the operatic suitability of a play even if he saw it in another language. The Italian speaker saw Sardou's La Tosca in French, and Belasco’s Madam Butterfly and Girl of the Golden West in English. The operatic potential of these
plays he divined from broad stage action. How might Philippa portray its dramatic concerns in stage pictures?

Act I

Requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 18 May
1967. A mostly-segregated congregation, but George the African-American father
and Jody the white Texan mother sit together. Words of praise from Sammy Davis Jr,
Ella Fitzgerald, President Johnson, and others. Cardinal Spellman says they
have met to celebrate the life of Philippa Duke Schuyler, pianist, composer,
first US woman war correspondent to die in Vietnam. Pianism dominates the liturgical
music; “Little girls everywhere who were inspired by Philippa’s example” play the
music for her requiem on grand pianos. (They are mostly, however, African-American girls.) Jody wants to know how Philippa can
“rest in peace when her potential lies unfulfilled”. She rejects George's attempts
at consolation.

Vietnam, September 1966. 35 year-old Philippa arrives in
war-torn Vietnam. She is confronted by signs of war – machine-gun emplacements,
barbed wire entanglements. She is briefed on the restrictions on her movements
and shown where she will play – on a broken-down upright piano in a ramshackle
hall. She bristles at the ‘control’ the embassy is trying to exercise – it
reminds her of her mother, Jody – and she tries to disguise her disappointment
at how far she has fallen “from Carnegie Hall”. Three black servicemen invite
her to play with them. She begins with Bach, but they begin to swing it. She
should feel comfortable but does not. Once again she feels neither white nor
black, even though she was supposed to be "the Answer [to America's racial problem]".

In a Saigon marketplace, Philippa meets a Vietnamese
necromancer who says she will “spend some time in the dragon’s mouth, but then
find a way out of it”. She tries on an áo dàiand is taken for Vietnamese. She realises she can give her embassy
chaperone the slip.

The three servicemen take her north and after they have
left, she stays overnight in a Vietnamese hamlet controlled by the Viet Cong. Yes
she can blend in but she doesn’t belong; this does not pacify her and is not
the ‘dragon’s den’ the necromancer was referring to.

Before heading back south she meets a
priest who is disturbed by her frantic seeking – (necromancy,
Tarot, a new-found catholic faith!) He introduces her to the ‘orphans’, the
abandoned children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women. She immediately feels
a kinship with these children who are between cultures like her and she wants
to stay and help. But the embassy chaperone finds her, and presents her with Jody’s demand
to return home to New York.

Act II

Back in Harlem, Jody is plotting Philippa’s future -
guaranteeing “continuity” by finding her a Mr Right and mapping out a showcase
career. It is as if she is talking to Young Philippa (who is in fact present). But adult Philippa knows she will never play those major venues again – no longer “safely cute”, she is a problem for well-heeled audiences who don't know how to categorize her. In fact she is bitter. She is angry with George who books
her concerts with the John Birch Society and believes she must succeed
regardless of colour but fails to acknowledge that “colour is held against us”. (She recounts something she
experienced with the three black servicemen).

Unwilling to rake over the family argument about Felipa
Monterra y Schuyler (Philippa’s proposed new identity from a few years back), Jody
buries herself in memories of uncomplicated Young Philippa and Young Philippa
plays. In a brief moment of happy reminiscence, adult Philippa joins in. But
she stops short when Jody reminds her of the scrapbooks, the books that plotted
and predicted her every move. “I was merely a puppet.” concludes adult Philippa
“and never stood where I could place myself”. Things are said that would have
been better left unsaid, Philippa concluding that Jody controlled her every
move.

Vengefully, Philippa has bedded the latest ‘Mr Right’ and
he is bemused when the first thing she puts back on when dressing is a large
crucifix. He mocks her beliefs and she attempts to defend herself, but a chorus
of all her past men come back to back up Mr Right's low opinion of her. One of
them, an African politician, mourns the son she aborted because he might prove
to be “too obviously black”. Philippa determines to get out of New York.

Act III

For a brief moment, George rekindles in Jody the
tenderness which lay at the heart of their little family experiment to prove
‘the American genius of hybridization’. They relive the optimism of their
marriage (Downtown in 1928) and their high hopes that Philippa’s birth would undo the hatred
between American blacks and whites after hundreds of years of “lynchings and
lashings”. But Jody feels Philippa’s mission will stall if she stays in
Vietnam.

In Vietnam, Philippa gets to know the orphans (among
other things, she teaches them music). A Military Liaison briefs the priest on
North Vietnamese Army movements around the city. Philippa determines that, as a
journalist and writer, she is in a unique position to promote the orphans’ case
to the world and wonders if she has found the answer to her own torments in
burying herself in their needs. But gunfire is already being heard in the
streets.

9 May 1967 ...
the approach of the NVA; closer sounds of rifle fire: there is a desperate need
for evacuation. Only one helicopter remains. Philippa has run off to find one
unaccounted-for orphan. Time presses. The priest is getting anxious. The sounds
of gunfire get louder. Philippa returns. She had thought she would leave her mark in music, but she has left behind her music and
notebooks and finally silenced the voices in her head of parents, critics and men-friends. Placing the
orphan in her lap, the Soldiers strap her in; the rotors start… Then, as the
sound of the rotor blades die down, we hear her voice. Out of the dragon's mouth? She is singing of fulfilment.
(Epilogue) Back at St. Patrick's Jody threatens to commit suicide, but the Choir bursts into song (Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi...?)

Hmm, is it gaining a shape?

Other blogs in this series

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa
9. - Montagnards and Lowlanders 1 Nov 2012 - looking at some of Philippa's writing from Vietnam
10. - A sobering thought, 13 Nov 2012 - recognising the prevalence of lynching in the US until well into the 20th century
11 - Words, words, words, 11 Dec 2012 - considering whether Latin should be one of the Philippa's languages given services even late into the 1960s would not have been in the vernacular.
12 - End of the rebirth, 20 Dec 2012 - some thoughts on the end of the Harlem Renaissance around the time of Philippa's birth.

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About Gordon Kalton Williams

He has devoted himself to understanding the link between words and music and dramatic action, and combines musical sensitivity, command of language and an instinct for the physics of drama.
Australian born, Gordon travels to and from the USA.